Posts with «machine hacks» label

Reborn is an australian digital creative agency whose mission is to design smart and innovative ideas.

Among their works, a very nice one regards a hack consisting in the re-engineering of a sofisticated espresso machine, to show its peculiar features in the process of coffee making.

By means of an Arduino board, the team can collect real-time information such as flow rate, temperature and pressure; then, a Processing sketch graphically presents this data to the user in an artistic fashion.

Finally, each cup of coffee made this way is decorated with an artwork summarizing this information in its own “personal identity”.

In his blog, Marc from Robot Dialogs presents a very nice hack involving a IBM Selectric II typewriter: by means of an Arduino board and several solenoids, the typewriter can be successfully connected to a computer to emulate a vintage teletype.

The complete story can be found here, together with several videos about its development.

PLOTS guys propose an interesting way to measure the quality of the air for indoor environments, by hacking a second-hand Roomba robot (an autonomous vacuum cleaner).

These robots are programmed to randomly move inside rooms to clean up the floor, so by adding a simple air quality sensor on top of one of them, it is possible to easily implement a sort of “random walker” that will sense for us the presence of gases (volatile organic chemicals, VOCs), such as NH3, alcohol, CO2 and so forth.

To keep track of the air quality measurements, the authors equipped the so hacked Roomba with an RGB led, whose color can be changed according to the air sample. By taking a long exposure picture of the room where the robot was roaming in, they could determine the areas where a high concentration of VOCs was present.

The complete description of the project can be found on the PLOTS’ website, while here you may find a short video about it:

PLOTS guys are also working on a different approach to air sensing, which does not make use of a Roomba robot but uses a hamster ball, instead. Further details can be found here.

Everyday, a lot of spam inevitably arrives to our mailboxes, forcing us to lose time in discerning fake emails from good ones, so everyone agrees on saying that spam is frustrating and completely useless.

This is almost true, since Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet Sola have taken advantage of spam coming from the Internet (more specifically, those messages “donated” by Eindhoven people) to make a very creative art project: first, they have recycled spam to algoritmically create poetry and, then, they have sent the result to a properly Arduino-hacked knitting machine (Arduino has been used to emulate the typing of the commands required to load the pattern).

From the authors:

Concerning the concept, we are interested in bringing together digital culture and traditional handicraft. To be more specific, the idea is to experiment with the form and meaning of SPAM. We turn SPAM into a romantic, funny or even sarcastic poetry and present it in unusual tangible form as knitted garment. To be more specific, we call final result dysfunctional wearable, because it reminds a sweater but is not really a one. Like SPAM, our dysfunctional wearable does not have a purpose.

The result is really impressive and it has been presented at two exhibitions, at Eindhoven and Malmö. Several pictures of the events can be found here. More information about the project can be found at Mar and Varvara‘s homepages.

Happy to see the KegBot Project adding a new fancy Android shell as casing.

“If you are looking for an exciting hardware project, KegDroid deserves a look. It is a sophisticated system that involves Android, Arduino, NFC, plumbing and — beer. Perhaps the final stroke of genius is to package the whole thing in a Droid body. Some how the little green fella looks at home on the bar. You have heard of desktop and laptop apps now we have bartop apps to add to the list“